more events on February 16
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1978
China and Japan sign a $20 billion trade pact, which is the most important move since the 1972 resumption of diplomatic ties.
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1966
The World Council of Churches being held in Geneva, urges immediate peace in Vietnam.
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1965
Four persons are held in a plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty, Liberty Bell and the Washington Monument.
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1959
Fidel Castro takes the oath as Cuban premier in Havana.
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1957
A U.S. flag flies over an outpost in Wilkes Land, Antarctica.
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1952
The FBI arrests 10 members of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina.
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1951
Stalin contends the U.N. is becoming the weapon of aggressive war.
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1945
American paratroopers land on Corregidor, in a campaign to liberate the Philippines.
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1944
Richard Ford, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist (The Sportswriter, Independence Day).
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1942
Tojo outlines Japan’s war aims to the Diet, referring to “new order of coexistence” in East Asia.
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1940
The British destroyer HMS Cossack rescues British seamen from a German prison ship, the Altmark, in a Norwegian fjord.
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1937
Dupont patents a new thread, nylon, which will replace silk in a number of products and reduce costs.
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1934
Thousands of Socialists battle Communists at a rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden.
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1923
Bessie Smith makes her first recording “Down Hearted Blues.”
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1904
George Kennan, U.S. diplomat and historian.
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1903
Edgar Bergen, ventriloquist and radio comedian.
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1886
Van Wyck Brooks, biographer, critic and literary historian.
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1865
Columbia, South Carolina, surrenders to Federal troops.
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1862
Fort Donelson, Tennessee, falls to Grant‘s Federal forces, but not before Nathan Bedford Forrest escapes.
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1852
Charles Taze Russell, founder of the International Bible Students Association which later became the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
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1845
Quinton Hogg, English philanthropist.
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1838
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1804
US Navy lieutenant Steven Decatur leads a small group of sailors into Tripoli harbor and burns the USS Philadelphia, captured earlier by Barbary pirates.
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1760
Cherokee Indians held hostage at Fort St. George are killed in revenge for Indian attacks on frontier settlements.
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1620
Frederick William, founder of Brandenburg-Prussia.